Through a collaboration with Lehigh University, Neag School of Education associate professor Jennifer Freeman will develop an intervention to improve college and career readiness for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. This $500,000 grant is sponsored by the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES). Freeman is a Co-PI with Lee Kern and Chris Liang at Lehigh University.

Friendships are powerful and positive – especially friendships between members of historically marginalized groups like women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals. In a paper recently published by the journal Human Resource Development Review, lead author Kristi Kaeppel ’20 Ph.D., a graduate assistant with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning; adjunct professor of philosophy at UConn Stamford and School of Business academic advisor Emma Björngard-Basayne ’15 MA, ’18 Ph.D.; and Grenier argue that workplaces that value and promote friendships can enhance the well-being of their workforce – to the benefits of both the individuals and the institutions.

We call them our colleagues, our peers, our mentors, or our coworkers – they are the people in our professional lives that also share in the details of our personal lives, who we associate with voluntarily, and who we trust with our thoughts, our experiences, and our fears.

Outside of work, we might call these relationships “friendships,” but it’s rarer to hear that particular f-word at the office – and the reason has to do with more than just semantics.

A group of researchers from the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education and UConn School of Medicine have received a $1 million grant from the Office of Special Education Programs to develop training for master’s students to address this problem. Professors Lisa Sanetti, Sandra Chafouleas, and Mary Beth Bruder have developed Interdisciplinary Preparation in Integrated and Intensive Practices (I3-PREP). The project is a multidisciplinary effort supported by UConn’s Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP), the Neag School of Education, the UConn School of Medicine.

The good news is that significant research and data on how to effectively teach literacy already exist. In 2012, an initiative developed by the General Assembly’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus studied best practices in early literacy and resulted in the “CT K-3 Literacy Initiative,” a pilot program with the UConn Neag School of Education that established school-wide improvement plans for reading and intensive interventions and provided ongoing literacy professional development.

Amit Savkar, who started working at UConn in 2007, was in charge of the math department’s online programs in 2013 when he was tasked with figuring out what was leading to high rates of failures and withdrawals in first-year math courses. He looked into things like how students’ math skills are assessed, and how pupils are placed in basic to advanced courses.

“When I taught middle school students about finding trustworthy sources online a decade ago, internet connections and processors were still so slow that the hunt for multiple sources to confirm a finding took so much effort that analysis and interpretation was a much smaller part of the equation,” says Rachael Gabriel.